The Migraine Girl looks at Missing Out on All the Fun. "It's frustrating, it's sad, it's annoying - but sometimes you have to say 'no' to what you really want to do, so you can take care of yourself.

Psychology of Painshares a story by former BBC Iraq correspondent, Andrew North, whose personal journey with pain led him through, "Why me? Why is this happening? Will it ever end?," to discovering how his own experiences are reflected in other people's lives.

Monday, April 28, 2008

ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2008) — Molecules from cone snail venom and African plants are being used by Queensland researchers as a blueprint to develop an oral drug to treat chronic pain.

Professor David Craik and Dr Richard Clark from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience have received $218,275 from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to aid in translating their research into a product available for Australians to use.

Studies on the molecule they have developed have shown that it is effective in relieving neuropathic pain in animals.

"Neuropathic pain is one of the most severe forms of chronic pain, and very difficult to treat," Dr Clark said.

"Regular pain occurs when the nervous system is stimulated by, for example, an injury, whereas neuropathic pain occurs when the nervous system itself is damaged."

"Current treatments in neuropathic pain only provide meaningful relief for one in three patients, and all of the current market-leading drugs have serious side effects, as well as taking up to three weeks to begin to take effect."

Peptides (small proteins) from cone snail venom have attracted recent attention from scientists, as they can target receptors with a high degree of accuracy, thus eliminating severe side effects.

But peptides also degrade rapidly in the body. Professor Craik and Dr Clark have overcome this problem by engineering a circular peptide, using a circular protein backbone discovered by Professor Craik and found in plants such as violets.

The NHMRC Development grant will allow the researchers to further test their molecule to fully establish its therapeutic potential.

"Successful outcomes from this project will provide additional confirmation of the suitability of our molecule as a treatment for neuropathic pain," Dr Clark said.

"Armed with these data, we will be able to secure a commercial partner and develop this molecule into a tablet for sufferers of chronic pain."

Saturday, April 26, 2008

WASHINGTON - Cuddling up against mother's bare skin can help tiny premature babies recover more quickly from the pain of being stuck with needles and other procedures, Canadian researchers reported on Wednesday.

Babies held tightly against their mother's skin in a "kangaroo mother care" position squirmed and grimaced less than babies swaddled in blankets, the researchers found.

"Skin-to-skin contact by the mother, referred to as kangaroo mother care, has been shown to be efficacious in reducing pain in three previous studies," Celeste Johnston of McGill University School of Nursing in Montreal and her colleagues wrote in the journal BioMed Central Pediatrics.

But those studies involved older babies. Her team tested 61 preterm babies born between 28 and 31 weeks.

Such preemies spend weeks in neonatal intensive care units and are often subjected to painful medical procedures. Parents and nurses alike find it one of the most distressing things about having an infant in the unit, the researchers said.

Johnston's team assigned half the newborns to "kangaroo mother care" and half to the usual condition of being swaddled in an incubator.

"In the experimental condition, the infant was held in kangaroo mother care for 15 minutes prior to and throughout heel lance procedure," they wrote.

"The pain response in very preterm neonates appears to be reduced by skin-to-skin maternal contact," Johnston said in a statement.

"This response is not as powerful as it is in older preterm babies, but the shorter recovery time using (kangaroo mother care) is important in helping maintain the baby's health."

The study (available at no cost online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpediatr/) showed the cuddled babies had recovered from the pain in about a minute and a half, while the incubator babies were still suffering more than three minutes after the procedure.

This delay could make a significant difference to the health of a very preterm baby, they said.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Pain as an Art Form

Pain doesn’t show up on a body scan and can’t be measured in a test. As a result, many chronic pain sufferers turn to art, opting to paint, draw or sculpt images in an effort to depict their pain.

“It’s often much more difficult to put pain into words, which is one of the big problems with pain,'’ said Allan I. Basbaum, editor-in-chief of Pain, the medical journal of The International Association for the Study of Pain. “You can’t articulate it, and you can’t see it. There is no question people often try to illustrate their pain.'’

One of the most famous pain artists is Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose work, now on exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is imbued with the lifelong suffering she experienced after being impaled during a trolley accident as a teenager. Her injuries left her spine and pelvis shattered, resulting in multiple operations and miscarriages, and she often depicted her suffering on canvas in stark, disturbing and even bloody images.

Sacramento resident Mark Collen, 47, is a former insurance salesman who suffers from chronic back pain. After his regular doctor retired due to illness, Mr. Collen was struggling to find a way to communicate his pain to a new doctor. Although he has no artistic training, he decided to create a piece of artwork to express his pain to the physician.

“It was only when I started doing art about pain, and physicians saw the art, that they understood what I was going through,” Mr. Collen said. “Words are limiting, but art elicits an emotional response.'’

Mr. Collen wrote to pain doctors around the world to solicit examples of art from pain patients. Working with San Francisco college student James Gregory, 21, who suffers from chronic pain as the result of a car accident, the two created the Pain Exhibit, an online gallery of art from pain sufferers. The images are evocative and troubling.

“Some of them are painful even to look at,'’ Dr. Basbaum said. In November, he included an image from the site on the cover of Pain; it can be seen here.

Finding ways to communicate pain is essential to patients who are suffering, many of whom don’t receive adequate treatment from doctors. In January, Virtual Mentor, the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, reported that certain groups are less likely to receive adequate pain care. Hispanics are half as likely as whites to receive pain medications in emergency rooms for the same injuries; older women of color have the highest likelihood of being undertreated for cancer pain; and being uneducated is a risk factor for poor pain care in AIDS patients, the journal reported.

Some of the images from the Pain Exhibit, like “Broken People” by Robert S. Beal of Tulsa, Okla., depict the physical side of pain. Others, such as “Against the Barrier to Life,” convey the emotional challenges of chronic pain. “I feel like I am constantly fighting against a tidal wave of pain in order to achieve some quality of life,'’ wrote the work’s creator, Judith Ann Seabrook of Happy Valley in South Australia. “I am in danger of losing the fight and giving up.'’

Mr. Collen said the main goal of the exhibit is to raise awareness about the problem of chronic pain. However, he said he hopes one day to find a sponsor to take the exhibit on tour.

“People don’t believe what they can’t see,'’ Mr. Collen said. “But they see a piece of art an individual created about their pain and everything changes.'’

To see a slide show of selections from the Pain Exhibit, click here, or visit the Web site to see the full gallery of photos. Another slide show from The Times in February features art created by migraine sufferers.

Migraine Increases Risk Of Severe Skin Sensitivity And Pain

ScienceDaily (Apr. 22, 2008) — People with migraine are more likely to experience exacerbated skin sensitivity or pain after non-painful daily activities such as rubbing one's head, combing one's hair and wearing necklaces or earrings, compared to people with other types of headache, according to a new study.

Researchers surveyed 16,573 people with headache about their type of headache, frequency, quality of life, depression and other illnesses that cause pain. The survey identified 11,737 participants with migraine, 1,491 with probable migraine (individuals have all but one of the symptoms required for migraine diagnosis) and 3,345 with another kind of headache.

The study found that 68 percent of those who reported almost daily headaches (chronic migraine) and 63 percent of those with episodic migraines reported allodynia, the name of this intensified and unpleasant, painful skin sensitivity. Forty-two percent of people with probable migraine reported the skin pain compared to 37 percent of those with daily or tension headache.

"This condition causes discomfort or pain even during everyday activities like touching one's hair or putting on clothes," said study author Marcelo E. Bigal, MD, PhD, with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY. "More importantly, this condition may be a risk factor for migraine progression, where individuals have migraines on more days than not. Identifying risk factors for progression is a very important public health priority. For example, it may be that individuals with allodynia should be more aggressively treated in order to prevent migraine progression, as well as to decrease this sensitivity on the skin."

The study also found this type of skin pain was more common in women with migraine and people with migraine who were obese or had depression.

This research was published in the April 22, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Phantom limbs (an often painful sensation that an amputated limb is still part of the body) affect approximately 40 to 80 percent of all amputees. Lorimer Moseley, a researcher at Oxford, looks at a recent study that used mirrors to erase this phantom pain.

The Supreme Court's regrettable ruling upholding Kentucky's use of lethal injection is a reminder of why government should get out of the business of executing prisoners. Rather than producing a crisp decision upholding the constitutionality of lethal injection, the court broke down into warring opinions debating the ugly question of how much unnecessary pain the state may impose. Most compelling were the dissenters, which wanted to know more about whether Kentucky was torturing inmates needlessly, and Justice John Paul Stevens's challenge to capital punishment in all forms.

Kentucky is one of at least 30 states that execute people by lethal injection of a three-drug cocktail. This method was meant to be humane, but it can cause inmates to feel excruciating pain. Kentucky lacks proper safeguards, including adequate training, to avoid needless suffering.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for himself and two other justices, found that Kentucky's procedures do not violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Even if they inflict great pain, he said, the inmates challenging them failed to show that the risk of harm was "objectively intolerable." (Seven justices concurred, to varying degrees.) Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia laid out an even crueler standard — unless an execution is "deliberately designed to inflict pain" it does not violate the Eighth Amendment. That would allow a lot of grossly negligent infliction of agony.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for herself and Justice David Souter, emphasized that Kentucky does not take steps that other states do to help ensure that inmates do not suffer. She argued that the case should be sent back to a lower court to determine if Kentucky should use such safeguards.

Justice Stevens, in a welcome surprise, said that he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty carries such high risks of error and discrimination, while doing so little good, that it is unconstitutional. He voted to uphold Kentucky's procedures because he believed precedent required it, but he said it is time for the court and legislatures to take a hard look at whether the death penalty's substantial costs outweigh its benefits.

Wednesday's ruling clears the way for states that had put their executions on hold to resume them. Lawyers for death-row inmates insist, however, that the legal test the Roberts decision used gives them a basis for more challenges to lethal injection. That means more fights over how much needless pain is too much.

The better course would be for the nation to undertake Justice Stevens's hard look at capital punishment — and leave it behind.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Temporomandibular Joint and Muscle Disorders (TMJDs) refers to a complex and poorly understood set of conditions that can cause pain in the area of the jaw joint and associated muscles and/or problems using the jaw. Both or just one of the TM joints may be affected. TMJDs can affect a person's ability to speak, eat, chew, swallow, make facial expressions, and even breathe.

People diagnosed with TMJDs may be experiencing other symptoms and medical conditions as part of broader multi-systems illnesses that go unrecognized. Patients with TMJDs are most often diagnosed and treated primarily by dentists or oral surgeons, while another medical professional may be treating them for other conditions, such as allergies, headaches, fibromyalgia, cardiac arrhythmias, sleep disorders, movement disorders, tinnitus and irritable bowel syndrome, each treating one of the constellation of conditions without considering the body as a collection of interrelated systems.

The TMJ Association (TMJA) was founded by TMJD patients for TMJD patients. We are dedicated to:

The patient described and interviewed below faces a crossroadsin medical care. Consider the patient's history and the patient'sperspective, expressed in his/her own words. Then review thequestions posed and imagine you are caring for this patient.How would you approach this crossroads? Using evidence fromthe literature and your own experience, respond by using thelink to the right. Responses will be selected for posting onlinebased on their timeliness and quality including use of the availableevidence, weighing the issues, and addressing the patient'sconcerns. The discussion of this Clinical Crossroads case, authoredby Dr James P. Rathmell, will be published in the May 7, 2008,issue of JAMA; responses must be received by April 30, 2008,to be considered for online posting.

Casino's like Harrah's are predicting "pain points" for individual customers -- how much they can lose at a setting and still come back for more. The pain point is an individualized prediction based on dozens of pieces of information about your demographics and gambling history. If you get close to your pain point, Harrah's might send out a "Luck Ambassador" to tap you on your shoulder and give a free steak dinner to make sure you don't lose too much money.

Airlines are doing the same thing. In the old days, if a flight was cancelled, an airline might book customers for the next flight on a first come, first serve basis. Later airlines started give priority to frequent fliers. Later yet, they started giving priority to the most profitable customer.

But now some airlines have started to predict their customers pain points. If you and I are bumpbed from a flight and there's only one seat left on the next flight, an airline might give that seat to the less profitable customer. Why? Because the airline might have estimated that the less profitable cusomter is closer to his or her pain point (say, she had three bad flights in the last year) and might stop using the airline. While you might be more profitable, the airline uses a massive dataset to estimate that you'll stick with them even if they bump you to a later flight. Welcome to the wonderful new world of data-driven decisionmaking.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Women whose first child is born by Cesarean section are less likely to have more kids compared to women who give birth in the traditional way, a recent study shows.

The finding is based on nearly 600,000 births between 1967 and 2003 tracked by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the University of Bergen. The study, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, showed that women who underwent C-section to have their first baby were 12 percent less likely to have another child than women who gave birth vaginally.

The study authors noted that the lower subsequent-birth rate among women who had undergone C-section was not related to medical problems that might have necessitated a Cesarean delivery in the first place. Instead, they speculated that women's views about childbirth may have been affected by the surgical procedure.

"We do not think it has anything to do with the medical reason for the Cesarean section or any physical consequences of the operation,'' said Dr. Kari Klungsøyr, head physician with the Medical Birth Registry of Norway, in a press release. "We can ask ourselves if it is such that if the women have had the child they want, maybe some cannot bear the thought of pregnancy, birth and any new operational procedures.''

THE runner's high: Every athlete has heard of it, most seem to believe in it and many say they have experienced it. But for years scientists have reserved judgment because no rigorous test confirmed its existence.

Yes, some people reported that they felt so good when they exercised that it was as if they had taken mood-altering drugs. But was that feeling real or just a delusion? And even if it was real, what was the feeling supposed to be, and what caused it?

Some who said they had experienced a runner's high said it was uncommon. They might feel relaxed or at peace after exercising, but only occasionally did they feel euphoric. Was the calmness itself a runner's high?

Often, those who said they experienced an intense euphoria reported that it came after an endurance event.

My friend Marian Westley said her runner's high came at the end of a marathon, and it was paired with such volatile emotions that the sight of a puppy had the power to make her weep.

Others said they experienced a high when pushing themselves almost to the point of collapse in a short, intense effort, such as running a five-kilometer race.

But then there are those like my friend Annie Hiniker, who says that when she finishes a 5-k race, the last thing she feels is euphoric. "I feel like I want to throw up," she said.

The runner's-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete's mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain's naturally occurring opiates. Running was not the only way to get the feeling; it could also occur with most intense or endurance exercise.

The problem with the hypothesis was that it was not feasible to do a spinal tap before and after someone exercised to look for a flood of endorphins in the brain. Researchers could detect endorphins in people's blood after a run, but those endorphins were part of the body's stress response and could not travel from the blood to the brain. They were not responsible for elevating one's mood. So for more than 30 years, the runner's high remained an unproved hypothesis.

But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner's body pumps out, the greater the effect.

Leading endorphin researchers not associated with the study said they accepted its findings.

"Impressive," said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins and a discoverer of endorphins in the 1970's.

"I like it," said Huda Akil, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Michigan. "This is the first time someone took this head on. It wasn't that the idea was not the right idea. It was that the evidence was not there."

For athletes, the study offers a sort of vindication that runner's high is not just a New Agey excuse for their claims of feeling good after a hard workout.

For athletes and nonathletes alike, the results are opening a new chapter in exercise science. They show that it is possible to define and measure the runner's high and that it should be possible to figure out what brings it on. They even offer hope for those who do not enjoy exercise but do it anyway. These exercisers might learn techniques to elicit a feeling that makes working out positively addictive.

The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker of the University of Bonn, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable.

The idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners' brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.

Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner's high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.

The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.

The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, "when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3." The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.

"Some people have these really extreme experiences with very long or intensive training," said Dr. Boecker, a casual runner and cyclist, who said he feels completely relaxed and his head is clearer after a run.

That was also what happened to the study subjects, he said: "You could really see the difference after two hours of running. You could see it in their faces."

In a follow-up study, Dr. Boecker is investigating if running affects pain perception. "There are studies that showed enhanced pain tolerance in runners," he said. "You have to give higher pain stimuli before they say, 'O.K., this hurts.' "

And, he said, there are stories of runners who had stress fractures, even heart attacks, and kept on running.

Dr. Boecker and his colleagues have recruited 20 marathon runners and a similar number of nonathletes and are studying the perception of pain after a run, and whether there are related changes in brain scans. He is also having the subjects walk to see whether the effects, if any, are because of the intensity of the exercise.

The nonathletes can help investigators assess whether untrained people experience the same effects. Maybe one reason some people love intense exercise and others do not is that some respond with a runner's high or changed pain perception.

Annie might question that. She loves to run, but wonders why. But her husband tells her that the look on her face when she is running is just blissful. So maybe even she gets a runner's high.

The strategies we use to survive pain, through expressing and suppressing it.

Today he has fully recovered, but in his work as the correspondent in Bagdad he witnessed the pain of others every day. In these programmes he discovers how his own experiences are reflected in other people's lives.

In Part One, North looks at how power, or the lack of it, shapes an individual's experience of pain.

In sharing the stories of victims of torture in Iraq and elsewhere, he finds out how those who are utterly powerless cope with suffering, and asks whether pain can simply be divided into the physical and the mental.

And he also meets those who seek out pain as a way of asserting their own power, like the cyclist Magnus Backstedt.

In Part Two, Andrew explores the strategies we use to survive pain, through expressing and suppressing it.How far is it possible to suppress pain? Drug companies are making billions convincing us that we now possess more knowledge and remedies than ever before, but pain continues to overwhelm millions.

Andrew talks to a pain doctor from the United States about America's more aggressive approach to pain control. He meets artist Deborah Padfield and speaks to her and her patients about a more creative way to express and deal with their pain. Andrew also finds out how the South African actor John Kani has conquered the pain he felt after the murder of his brother.

Modern life is loud. The jolting buzz of an alarm clock awakens the ears to a daily din of trucks idling, sirens blaring, televisions droning, computers pinging and phones ringing — not to mention refrigerators humming and air-conditioners thrumming. But for the 12 million Americans who suffer from severe tinnitus, the phantom tones inside their head are louder than anything else.

Often caused by prolonged or sudden exposure to loud noises, tinnitus (pronounced tin-NIGHT-us or TIN-nit-us) is becoming an increasingly common complaint, particularly among soldiers returning from combat, users of portable music players, and aging baby boomers reared on rock 'n' roll. (Other causes include stress, some kinds of chemotherapy, head and neck trauma, sinus infections, and multiple sclerosis.)

Although there is no cure, researchers say they have never had a better understanding of the cascade of physiological and psychological mechanisms responsible for tinnitus. As a result, new treatments under investigation — some of them already on the market — show promise in helping patients manage the ringing, pinging and hissing that otherwise drives them to distraction.

The most promising therapies, experts say, are based on discoveries made in the last five years about the brain activity of people with tinnitus. With brain-scanning equipment like functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers in the United States and Europe have independently discovered that the brain areas responsible for interpreting sound and producing fearful emotions are exceptionally active in people who complain of tinnitus.

"We've discovered that tinnitus is not so much ringing in the ears as ringing in the brain," said Thomas J. Brozoski, a tinnitus researcher at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield.

Indeed, tinnitus can be intense in people with hearing loss and even those whose auditory nerves have been completely severed. In the absence of normal auditory stimulation, the brain is like a driver trying to tune in to a radio station that is out of range. It turns up the volume trying but gets only annoying static. Richard Salvi, director of the Center for Hearing and Deafness at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said the static could be "neural noise" — the sound of nerves firing. Or, he said, it could be a leftover sound memory.

Adam Edwards, a 34-year-old co-owner of a wheel repair shop in Dallas, said he developed tinnitus four years ago after target shooting with a pistol. "I had all the risk factors," he said. "I grew up hunting, I played drums in a band, I went to loud concerts, I have a loud work environment — everything but living next to a missile launch site." His tinnitus, which he described as a "computer beeping" sound, was so intense and persistent that he needed sedatives to sleep at night.

Mr. Edwards says he has gotten relief from a device developed by an Australian audiologist, which became widely available in the United States last year. Manufactured by Neuromonics Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa., it looks like an MP3 player and delivers sound spanning the full auditory spectrum, digitally embedded in soothing music.

Similar to white noise, the broadband sound, tailored to each patient's hearing ability, masks the tinnitus. (The music is intended to ease the anxiety that often accompanies the disorder.) Patients wear the $5,000 device, which is usually not covered by health insurance, for a minimum of two hours a day for six months. Since completing the treatment regimen last year, Mr. Edwards said his tinnitus had "become sort of like Muzak at a department store — you hear it if you think about it, but otherwise you don't really notice."

A small, company-financed study in the journal Ear & Hearing in April 2007 indicated that the Neuromonics method was 90 percent successful at reducing tinnitus. A larger study is under way to determine its long-term effectiveness.

Anne Howell, an audiologist at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas, said the Neuromonics device was a big improvement over older sound therapies that required wearing something that looked like a hearing aid all the time and took 18 to 24 months.

"The length of time was discouraging for many patients," she said. "And a lot of them told me that wearing something that looks like a hearing aid would cause a problem in their professional life."

Other treatments showing promise include surgically implanted electrodes and noninvasive magnetic stimulation, both intended to disrupt and possibly reset the faulty brain signals responsible for tinnitus. Using functional M.R.I. to guide them, neurosurgeons in Belgium have performed the implant procedure on several patients in the last year and say it has suppressed tinnitus entirely.

But the treatment is controversial. "It's a radical option and not proven yet," said Jennifer R. Melcher, an assistant professor of otology and laryngology at Harvard Medical School.

The magnetic therapy, similar to treatments used for depression and chronic pain, involves holding a magnet in the shape of a figure eight over the skull. Clinicians use functional M.R.I. to aim the magnetic pulses so they reach regions of the brain responsible for interpreting sound. Patients receive a pulse every second for about 20 minutes. "It works for some people but not for others," said Anthony Cacace, professor of communication science and nerve disorders at Wayne State University in Detroit. Since tinnitus has so many causes, Dr. Cacace said, the challenge now is to find out which "subsets of patients benefit from this treatment."

Researchers in Brazil have published a study indicating that a treatment called cranial-sacral trigger point therapy can relieve tinnitus in some head and neck trauma cases by releasing muscles that constrict hearing and neural pathways.

And drugs intended to treat alcoholism, epilepsy, Alzheimer's and depression that alter levels of various neurotransmitters in the brain like serotonin, dopamine and gamma-aminobutyric acid have quieted tinnitus in some published animal and human studies.

"We've never been so hopeful," said Dr. Salvi, of SUNY Buffalo, "of finding treatments for a disorder that haunts people and follows them everywhere they go."